Deep volcanic hydration?

Volvic are doing their bit to make the world a stupider place by re-running their ‘14-day challenge‘ TV ad. It’s an irritating ad in lots of ways – it’s one of those ones that has a ‘genuine’ member of the public showing their ‘genuine’ enthusiasm for the product (which the gimp in question refers to exclusively as ‘Volvic’ rather than ‘water’). Anyway, my beef with it is the following sentence, which is accompanied by a pseudo-scientific animated graphic of, like, volcanoes and layers and shit:

Deep volcanic hydration? Deep volcanic hydration? This is the worst kind of pseudo-science arse and I’m sick of advertisers getting away with it to flog their latest rebranding of their crappy product.

I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about this stoopidness about a year ago when the ad was first running, and I thought I’d share their response with the interwebs. They told me:

“We feel the ad draws attention to the way in which Volvic water is filtered. Whilst we understand your concerns, the ad doesn’t claim that Volvic is superior to tap water or other mineral water. Furthermore, the ad doesn’t make any claim about the relative hydration levels of types of water or state that Volvic hydrates the body in a more efficient manner. We understand that some viewers may object to the claim ‘deep volcanic hydration’ but we don’t consider it likely to materially mislead viewers about the product.”

So Volvic gets to keep polluting everyone’s brains and the world keeps turning. Ho hum.